How To Make Fundamentalists

I’ve been corresponding with a reader, a Millennial who is a believing Christian, but whose faith was badly damaged by growing up in a hard-nosed fundamentalist church. I told him that when I was a lot younger, I always used to kind of admire fundamentalists from afar. I didn’t want to be one, but they struck me as being committed to the faith in ways that the soft Christians like me weren’t.

His response was interesting:

See, it’s the namby-pambies who create the fundies to a large degree. A lack of seriousness and rigor in one group breeds a perverted form of rigor in another.

What about you readers who have experience in fundamentalism — do you agree with my correspondent?

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96 Responses to How To Make Fundamentalists

MC:
“In the last 75 years or so, there has always been tension in the middle east between westernizing, only vaguely Muslim elites and the common folk.”

Yes I suppose that is true. And I think the Islamic Brotherhood would also agree that they want a new world order, (a reverted order) and one that is in opposition to the “west.”

However, and I guess this relates to the point that other commenters have previously made (what is fundamentalism) if you look at Egyptian culture, Saudi culture, etc, it is very fundamentalist, independantly of and predating the political development of the Muslim Brotherhood. The behavior culturally looks to me like an historically rational assessment of hardship, not a reaction to laxity.

IndianaMike: “Speaking of ‘fundamentalists’ as if they were some monolithic and homogenous group is as inaccurate as speaking of what all Presbyterians are like or all Catholics worldwide are like. It is just lazy thinking.”

I wholeheartedly agree. As for fundamentalism as it was originally presented, either the Bible is the infallible revelation of God or it is not. If it is, then it should be believed and heeded in its entirety with all seriousness. If it is not, then its commands are neither universal in scope nor any more morally authoritative than Aesop’s Fables. That is, if the Bible is just a collection of fictional tales about imaginary people rather than a historical document, then I, for one, could really care less what it has to say about anything. Most professing Christians today want to pick and choose the passages which agree with their personal opinions and ignore the rest, but the Bible has to be accepted or rejected as a whole, because its 66 books present an integrated message from beginning to end.

That being said, it is crucial to note that some earlier commands of God have been modified or even deprecated (in the computer science sense of the word) by God as time has passed, particularly upon Christ’s advent and the giving of further special revelation. The chief examples of those are the Levitical priesthood and the specific practices given in the Mosaic Law to the Israelites which created practical lifestyle separations between them and the unbelieving Gentiles surrounding them (ex., what to wear or eat). Despite the wishes of some Jews and most premillennial Christians, the Jewish Temple has been destroyed forever, the Levitical priesthood having fully served its purpose, and there is no longer an operative distinction between ethnic Jews and non-Jews in Christ (ROM. 1:16, COL 3:9-11).

George Marsden defined a fundamentalist as an evangelical who is angry about something. That isn’t too far from the truth. Having been raised in a very fundamental Baptist church, I think your correspondant ‘s quip is spot on.

The key word for the Fundamentalist in my experience is “separation.” They want to separate from “worldly ways” and from groups who espouse or compromise with worldly ways. Fundamentalism is a perversion of theological purity and practice that results in exclusion. It is a modern day Pharisaism. Fundamentalists value safety, it is a community in quarantine.

While I don’t think I was damaged by it, I did leave it on my own accord to embrace what some would call a more confessional stance.

the Bible has to be accepted or rejected as a whole, because its 66 books present an integrated message from beginning to end.

Actually, they don’t. The 66 books, even if you refrain from expanding to 72 books, or 83 books, recognized by various branches of Christianity, present remarkably different and sometimes contradictory messages.

The reason Jesus flummoxed the men who were ready to stone the woman taken in adultery is that the bare text of the Torah authorized and just about mandated that she be stoned. Jesus may have said at one point, I came to fulfill the law, but he fulfilled it in a manner that changed how it was applied and practiced considerably.

Now if you ask an Orthodox (Jewish) Torah scholar, he will explain that the written text is missing a great deal of essential content, which is one reason Christians don’t understand it or what it means. The full and true meaning can only be understood by familiarity with the Oral Torah, which was never meant to be written down, but because of the diaspora, eventually was — that was the beginning of the Talmudic texts.

Also, in Jewish teaching, only the Torah, the Five Books, is “words and music by the Creator of the universe.” The rest are nevi’im, and writings. Nevi’im is loosely translated prophets, which differ from the Torah in that mortal men were trying to poetically explain a transcendent experience, as distinct from direct dictation by God. The writings are not mythical, per se, but they are a chronology of events, not necessarily Holy Writ. If you look at Job, there are whole chapters which, in the end, God rejects wholesale, telling Job’s friends you have not said the right thing like my servant Job.

Some Christians resolve a good deal of tension by asserting that only the New Testament is Scripture for us. There is a certain logic to that, but I can’t help thinking there is much we can still learn from the Tanach (aka Old Testament). Certainly the Old has a different application to our life when viewed through the lens of the New.

The notion that the 66 Books are The Complete And Perfect Word of God started rather innocuously, as John Wycliffe, and later Christian thinkers like Martin Luther and John Calvin examined, if there is no hierarchy authorized to speak for God, if the Bishop of Rome is not God’s Vicar on Earth, where then do we turn for authority in spiritual matters? Obviously, we each have to read Scripture for ourselves, not rely on an earthly spiritual overlord.

But, it does not follow that The Book, or my or your reading of the book, is complete and infallible. There are many passages that seem to have ten layers of meaning, and none of us can truly grasp all of them.

Which is why, in the final analysis, fundamentalist use of the Bible is no better, and no worse, than ex cathedra pronouncements by the Bishop of Rome.

Huh? Jesus died for humanity. Or if that’s still too abstract, then for each and everyone of us, the seven billion alive now, and all the billions of preceded us, and those who will follow after.

Hi JonF,

The point, I think, is that whatever The Fall was (that is, whether one believes in Original Sin, or just that the pair of sinners brought sin into the world), if Jesus died to fix whatever happened, and whatever happened was “just a metaphor,” then “Jesus died for a metaphor.”

Creationists and the new atheists both tend to believe that human evolution precludes any kind of event that one might call “The Fall,” however long that event may be construed, because in any case there was no original paradise. If Genesis is entirely metaphorical, there’s no reconciliation for Jesus to accomplish — there was no “conciliation” in the first place.

Another Matt and JonF, the thing that gets me is that everything about life’s design suggests that death is an integral part of the plan (if there is one). That conflict between organisms and the resulting suffering were baked into the cake from the beginning.

A common human reaction is to blame ourselves for suffering, that it must be something we’ve done, because a reason is better than no reason at all. The biblical fall narrative, as well as the Pandora’s box myth seem to be mankind trying to reconcile suffering with our wish that it wasn’t the case, using this common defense mechanism.

Although I give credit to the author of the book of Job who really did seem to get it. The ending is completely unsatisfactory because even though God restores Job’s health and prosperity, his previous wife and kids are dead, and it’s clear Job suffered for no reason at all.

A lot of what confuses the matter is that we’ve divided America into two factions and that Christianity has been identified with the the right. Most fundamentalists, and even just cultural conservatives, can easily look at a church that embraces homosexuality, militant feminism and abortion as having compromised the teachings of the faith in the name of politics. What they often have trouble with is seeing that embracing social darwinism, careless militarism, and the death penalty is equally compromised.

MH: [T]he thing that gets me is that everything about life’s design suggests that death is an integral part of the plan (if there is one). That conflict between organisms and the resulting suffering were baked into the cake from the beginning.

Exactly. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythos, present in The Silmarillion and in other unpublished works, he elaborates the idea (in mythological language) that the universe was flawed from the beginning as a result of what we’d call fallen angels or demiurges. Humans were always mortal, and the “Fall” wasn’t what made us mortal, but what caused us to be unable to reconcile ourselves with mortality.

Another Matt: Creationists and the new atheists both tend to believe that human evolution precludes any kind of event that one might call “The Fall”

As the Fall is traditionally understood, this is exactly correct

If Genesis is entirely metaphorical, there’s no reconciliation for Jesus to accomplish — there was no “conciliation” in the first place.

Here I disagree. There is no reasonable doubt that humans evolved, that all the death and nastiness of the cosmos were indeed “baked into the cake from the beginning”. Everything we know indicates that Genesis must be metaphorical. That doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t save; just that we have to reinterpret our theology to understand how he saves us from sin and evil.

This book is a good start in that direction; this post at Vox Nova discuss some of the work being done in this area by the Jesuits; and for those who are interested, I’ve been doing a long series of posts dealing with just this issue over at my own blog. I think a metaphorical reading of Genesis is by no means fatal to Christianity.

Re: If it is, then it should be believed and heeded in its entirety with all seriousness.

This ignores the fact that the Bible is not self-interpreting and in fact includes many obscure and difficult passages (as well as passages deliberately focused and limited to specific times, places and individuals). Naive fundamentalism turns every specific passage into a general commandment, is blind to historical and sometimes even textual context, equally blind to allegory and metaphor, and supposes that anyone and everyone can interpret Scripture as well as the most trained and pious religious scholar (which derives from an equally naive American egalitarianism).

Re: That doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t save; just that we have to reinterpret our theology to understand how he saves us from sin and evil.

Yes. And that’s one reason I am at home in the Orthodox Church, because our traditional theology of the Fall and of redemption still works without a literal reading of Genesis. In our thought the Fall (and Original Sin) is conceived as a break in humankind’s original communion with God leaving us in darkness and ignorance which in turn allows the Devil to direct us into the bondage of sin. As I posted above Christ’s sacrifice was not, in our view, a transaction with a vengeful Father, but a ruse perpetrated on the Death and Devil by which we humans, enslaved and imprisoned by those powers, can find freedom. The historical specifics of how we came to be in that state are not relevant: the fact is that we are, and Christ offers a path to freedom.

Another Matt, please see my post above. How we came to be in the state of sin is simply not important. What matters is that we are so, and Christ died AND ROSE AGAIN (something often elided over in the Western formulation) to save us. We do not need Genesis to know we are in this state. One need only look at the world right now today to understand that are not living in blissful paradise. When I have occasionally encountered resolute atheists who insist that “evil” is unreal, I ask them to imagine standing in Auschwitz on the morning before its liberation, or in Hiroshima a little past 8am Aug 6 1945 and then repeat that claim with the sight and sound and stench of it all in running through them like a riptide.
None of that is “metaphor”.

This might all be somewhat OT, but a few points about your 10:52 comment:

1) I’ve read some of your essays in your “Pretty Good Book” series. Interesting stuff, even where I disagree. I’ll try to hit up the Fall series sometime.

2) Everything we know indicates that Genesis must be metaphorical: I’ve discussed this with you and others in various other comment threads. There is a view out there that chapter 1 of Genesis is a poetical, non-literal explanation of the creation of the world (with which I assume that you agree), but the rest of the “primeval” history (roughly chapters 2-11, or everything before the appearance of Abram) describes historical events which have been mistranslated or misinterpreted as global, rather than fitting narrowly into a neolithic Mesopotamian context:

— Adam and Eve were actual people, living in an irrigated garden near ancient Ur (modern Nasiriyah), who became progenitors of the Hebrews, not all humanity (which already existed because of evolution)
— the Flood of Noah was an especially devastating but still regional event in Mesopotamia, and the animals in his ark were local livestock
— the Tower of Babel was a Babylonian zigguraut

And so on. Moreover, there are verses throughout the Hebrew Scriptures which draw distinctions between the “sons of Adam” (bnai adam), possibly meaning Israelites, and “common” man (ish or enosh), possibly meaning goyim (e.g., see Psalm 8:4 in the original Hebrew, not its English translations). These suggest that perhaps the ancient Israelites did not see Adam as the beginning of all humanity, though still a flesh-and-blood figure.

I commend to you the book Historical Genesis, by Richard James Fischer, as well as his website “Genesis Proclaimed,” which contains a proposed corrected translation of Genesis 1-11. I also note that the excellent BioLogos (biologos.org) foundation has discussed some of what I am saying here. I commend also this essay by Tim Keller: biologos.org/uploads/projects/Keller_white_paper.pdf

(Note: I don’t include link to everything so my comment does not go to spam.)

This ignores the fact that the Bible is not self-interpreting and in fact includes many obscure and difficult passages (as well as passages deliberately focused and limited to specific times, places and individuals). Naive fundamentalism turns every specific passage into a general commandment, is blind to historical and sometimes even textual context, equally blind to allegory and metaphor, and supposes that anyone and everyone can interpret Scripture as well as the most trained and pious religious scholar (which derives from an equally naive American egalitarianism).

My dad is a biologist turned Lutheran pastor; and as such, I grew up with the funny notion that the Rite of Spring dinosaur evolution sequence from Disney’s Fantasia depicted in part God’s creation of the universe. I myself am on track to become a genetic engineer; a field in which the theory of evolution is as central as the theory of gravity is to physics.

It’s extremely difficult for me to hear of the existence of an argument between “fundamentalists” and “confessionals;” I never realized in my childhood that such a thing existed, and knowing it exists pains me now. I feel very strongly that faith can always be reconciled sensibly with sight. The idea of decrying use of either is simply sheer folly. To illustrate this, I will use what I know best; the “argument” between creationist fundamentalists and other Christian evolutionaries.

If God is who we think he is, then any word we’ve heard from Him must be true, after a fashion. Accepting the further premise, then, that Genesis 1 is one of God’s true words, it follows that Genesis 1 should closely match the story we can see with our eyes, written in the stars and in our DNA.

Sure enough, if we look at the root of the evolutionary story and that of Genesis, we find them to be in extremely close synchrony. Day 1 consists of the creation of life; and the first thing that happened by scientific reckoning is the condensation of glowing-hot matter from the expanding seed of God’s universe. The first two things to exist in both stories are light (matter) and dark (void).

Day 2 is the formation of “firmament.” To put it mildly, this is a slight problem; we know that no such thing exists. A firmament in the Hebrew cosmology was a very specific dome of something that doesn’t actually cover the planet. Yet if we take “firmament” to mean “sky,” to mean “atmosphere,” we can say that this was the formation of nebulae; the stuff from which stars and gasses later formed. As to waters gathered under these heavens, the story could easily have been told from the perspective of the forming proto-planet earth; the same waters of deep space that formed the stars beyond the nebula formed a planet below that would someday be called Earth. This is a problematic way of speaking, though not nearly so much as the subsequent day.

Day 3 is the day which would (should) confound strict scientists; it is the day on which grass springs forth from an earth which by science alone should not have been fertile until after the formation of stars. This is a problem, and I admit that freely. It’s saving grace is that Day 3 sets up the cycle of the seasons, a cycle created by the gravitational rotation of the earth around the sun. It could then represent metaphorically the induction of spin in the forming nebula, spin that would eventually create the stars later on Day 4.

In the ancient Middle East events in similar creation stories were often given in order of cultural importance rather than (or perhaps in addition to) chronologically. The story leaves open a strictly evolutionary (and somewhat unsatisfactory) stance that this represents nebular spin prior to star formation. Nevertheless, I think it’s a more likely explanation to say that if indeed this story was divine revelation, that the human author of Genesis moved the cycle of seasons up to make the story more relevant to the lives of those who would first hear it. Or perhaps both; perhaps the author was given a glimpse of the meaning of such gravitational rotation, that it would enable the seasonal changes that were so important to the people of that time. I will return to this human element; because whatever the case, this is definitely a problematic day for reconciling faith and science.

Day 4 is back on track; it can easily correspond to the final formation of the sun, and the clearing of the proto-solar-system such that the planets would be visible from earth. It’s the day on which there are signs to see the seasons made on Day 3.

Day 5, likewise, conforms very well with the evolutionary story; each individual verse shows the structure of sealife appearing first then birds (the ancestors of whom, dinosaurs, certainly did dominate well before the age of mammals.)

Day 6 is then the day on which mammalian life develops and flourishes, and at the end of this day, us humans.

Day 7 is then the day on which God rests. Climatically speaking, it is most certainly true that we lived in a comparatively stable era until recently. However, as an aside, there is another meaning to this particular day, a kind of joke or clever twist that we modern folk miss. Anyone from the ancient Middle East would’ve known that deity only rests in a temple; the fact that this single story merges the temple inauguration text and creation story is a powerful testament to the Hebrew concept that God reigns over all creation.

This dual purpose to the first creation story creates a sort of void. The ancient Middle Eastern expectation of two stories, temple inauguration and creation can be filled by the second creation story, that which starts in Genesis 2:4, this time the story of the special creation of two particular individuals, Adam and Eve, spiritual common ancestors for the now-existing species homo sapiens. The idea that the two creation stories relate different narratives, one the creation of everything, and one the creation of individuals, then reconciles at least two details of the story: the detail that Cain when he left his parents, went and found (miraculously?) a wife; and the detail that in Genesis 1, man and woman are created at the same time and that in Genesis 2, Adam is created before Eve.

I now come to why I’ve never understood the argument between fundamentalists and confessionals. Metaphorically speaking, this all fits very well with the text; but even fundamentally, one can only imagine that any man writing down words of divine revelation must struggle to fit it into whatever mortal language he has at hand, namely, the language of his own culture and preconceived expectations. If God told an Ancient Hebrew man the story of evolution, how on earth would that man have the words to write it down in any form other than that which he knew? If it were God alone who was writing, (or perhaps if God were not taking his audience into account) why would He have chosen the non-existent “firmament” instead of a more salient word like “air” or “wind?” Fundamentally speaking, it is not odd to think that the story of evolution would come out, when written by an Ancient Hebrew, a lot like the story we do find in Genesis 1.

This is my central argument to abolish the distinction between confessionalism and fundamentalism; true understanding comes of reconciling competing versions of the truth. A person standing in a valley on one side of the mountain cannot see the other side; and if unless you’re willing to climb over or around that metaphorical mountain of a story we call the Bible, you will only ever have your half of the story. I don’t claim that the entire key to understanding the Genesis creation account lies in the few short paragraphs I just wrote; but I certainly find it helpful to think that there are in fact two sides to this monumental book. I am disinclined to believe that the same God who endowed us with reason intended us to forgo it completely in the name of dogma; just as I am disinclined to think that the universe in which faith was developed was made by something we cannot in turn have faith in.

Another Matt, thanks for the pointer to the PDF. I’ve read a few analysis of the Book of Job and they’re always interesting.

Turmarion, I’ve poked around on your blog and read some of the essays. My impression is that if Christian theology needs some reinterpretation they better hurry up. The West is squarely on a trajectory to becoming post Christian because of this problem. The third world can be a growth market for a while, but eventually the same factors will likely occur there.

Noah172: I’ve read some of your essays in your “Pretty Good Book” series. Interesting stuff, even where I disagree.

Many thanks! I don’t expect readers to agree, necessarily; but if I can write stuff that’s interesting and thought-provoking, then I’ve done my job. In fact, I don’t always agree with myself. By that I mean that the religious issues I discuss at my blog are things that I’ve pondered, brooded, and obsessed on for decades, and I’m still working on some of them. I may not come to a totally satisfactory answer before I die; and I may change my mind more than once. I actually have modified my thinking over the course of the “Legends of the Fall” series, and have not updated it in a bit because I’m still evaluating and re-evaluating it. Not that I think we mortals will ever get very much clear in this life; but it’s still worthwhile, IMO, to make the attempt.

Another Matt, interesting document link–thank you!

MH: My impression is that if Christian theology needs some reinterpretation they better hurry up. The West is squarely on a trajectory to becoming post Christian because of this problem.

Completely agreed! I wish more people out there were taking this seriously and doing the theological heavy lifting. I fear it may be too little, too late–but we’ll see.

Your correspondent uses interesting phraseology. It is succinct, and sadly, probably more accurate than not. About ninety percent of people are sheep who want to be told what to do, how to think, and how to act. The namby-pambies don’t really fill that need, causing people to seek “a perverted form of rigor” which does. Most religious people don’t want to have to think. They simply want to be assured if they go to church, believe in Jesus, get baptized, and follow the church dogma they will go to heaven. The “fundies” are very good at selling that simplicity, and thus no thinking is required. It’s the rigorous church dogma which can get convoluted or “perverted” if you will.

@Noah172 I am not disagreeing with you when you say Noah’s flood was a regional event, but then why does every culture from China to the American Indians in their ancient stories tell about a great flood. Could it have been more world wide caused by the end of the ice age?

Re: The West is squarely on a trajectory to becoming post Christian because of this problem.

There are lots of reasons the West is increasingly becoming post-Christian (well, outside of Poland and Ireland), but I really doubt that the literal interpretation of Genesis has anything to do with it.

There are plenty of churches which never have insisted that Genesis is literal, and plenty that have accepted evolution since it was discovered. That’s good, but they aren’t really doing any better than the Southern Baptists at holding on to their members.

Hector_St_Clare, I’m not talking about a literal reading of Genesis. I’m talking about how can man be considered fallen in a universe which was full of strife and suffering before we ever came on the scene? Even looked at metaphorically the fall narrative blames humanity for its predicament. Moreover how does Christ’s crucifixion help matters any?

The theology I was taught was essentially that Christ paid a debt that humanity owed via his crucifixion. But to me that theology didn’t make sense to me given what mankind has learned in the past 150 years. So I could not believe it and I don’t think I’m alone.

I’ve read your writing on this before and you essentially blame the angelic fall for the strife that preceded man. But I don’t see how man can be blamed for that, nor how crucifixion helps matters any.

Many cultures have flood legends because many places in the world have regular floods: civilization starts with agriculture, agriculture needs fresh water, people settle near great rivers, great rivers flood. Some hunter-gatherer peoples have flood legends as well, because they too live major bodies of water. While world mythology is not my forte — paging Turmarion! — I have heard that the Japanese have no flood legend, which I would say argues strongly against a global flood (how would the Japanese, a large ethnos living on narrow islands with a highly literate culture, have missed or not recorded a world-destroying flood?).

There are also a number of scientific problems with a single global flood which taken together rule it out as possibility — certainly any time recent enough for modern humans (meaning homo sapiens) to preserve its memory in an oral tradition which could later (as in millenia later) be recorded.

MH, as a Biblical evolutionist, here’s my rough take on your question:

Humans did indeed evolve from organic animal life. That organic life has impulses, motivators, passions, life cycles, that are far from human in nature, and very far from divine. Its not quite as rigidly predetermined as Richard Dawkins like to fantasize (“The Selfish Gene” was pure speculative narrative, not science), but organic instincts are not a bad match for “evil nature of the flesh.”

Fast forward to, then God breathed into man, and man became a living soul (nefesh chayyim in the original Hebrew). The nefesh chayyim is supposed to be in charge, but became over-eager to fully integrate its own faculties into the body to which it was loosely attached.

Thus, we are sometimes overwhelmed by our animal nature, rather than our animal instincts serving the divine component. Cross reference this to research that malnutrition early in childhood literally leaves the brain without many essential human faculties for life, leading to anti-social behavior, rampant criminality, etc. Yes, that’s material, but its a material example that may have metaphysical counter-parts. Nothing metaphysical can be proven.

A Talmudic scholar I have often posed Old Testament questions to said, for the nefesh chayyim, it was like the difference between sitting in the driver’s seat steering a car, and having one’s nervous system fully integrated into the car, where one feels the turning of the drive shaft, the motion of the pistons, the current flowing through the electrical cables… could be quite overwhelming.

Again, this isn’t proof. As Paul wrote, we walk by faith, not by sight, because these matters are not subject to scientific investigation. But, it can make rational and logical sense, taking into consideration all the data we know about the material world.

I used to have an online friend who was both an evangelical Christian and a biologist — particularly a diehard evolutionist.
He argued that since Jesus’ redemption of humanity stretches back through history to include people born before he came to earth, the effects of the fall could also have gone backwards in time.

Doesn’t anyone else find this fascinating? What is so interesting is that Soviet types of communism tried to stamp out religion from above and, in the West, it kind of fell apart from the inside. Sure there are all kinds of attacks from above today on religion, especially Christianity, but not in the manner of violent government repression. Soft repression is more like it.

I guess I won’t live to see the day when liberals will acknowledge that they have a religion without a god, but it’s a religion just the same, so really all we had in society is the changeover of one ruling religion to another. There is no longer a separation of Church and State. There is the non-acknowledgment that this non-deistic Church is largely the current State. When you think about it this way, it becomes clear that it is impossible to separate Church from State in any society.

Siarlys Jenkins, OK let me paraphrase that to see if I understood you.

You are essentially saying that biblical evolutionists view the fall of man as mankind getting too enmeshed with their animal nature. This can allow the animal nature to be in the driver’s seat rather than the other way around. Basically humans are not fully rational entities.

I would assume that sin remains going against the will of God. So the animal component is the source of the this tendency of mankind?

Noah, I’m not aware of any Japanese flood myths, so as far as I know, you’re right on that. Also, my understanding is that the Egyptians had no flood myth, and that many South American Indian tribes lacked such tales. Certainly the idea of a global deluge is not tenable, as you say.

MH, I don’t buy the penal substitution theory of atonement, either. That’s a super-complex subject, but here is an article that discusses some of the other models, with links to further discussions.

MH, I didn’t see your response to Siarlys when I made my last post. I don’t think his perspective is tenable, either. Here in a nutshell is my take on the issue (I can’t condense it enough to fit a post here, and it’s the culmination of a bunch of other posts on the Atonement, anyway).

Turmarion, thanks for the pointers. I’ve read your original sin essay before and I’m inclined to agree that any defects with the creation rest with the creator. But I figure I need to make sure that I understood what Siarlys was saying.

Your post on the ransom model of atonement brought to mind another of those baffling passages in the New Testament. When the Devil was tempting Jesus in Matthew 4:1-11. I kept thinking that Jesus has already turned water into wine, and likely knows he can cure leprosy, heal a blind man, raise the dead, and do the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Is the Devil a complete idiot? Obviously if Jesus is hungry it’s because he wants to be hungry. How can you tempt someone who can work miracles?

MH, I can’t speak for an organized body of thought called “Biblical evolutionists.” I may be the only one on earth, for all I know, and if there are others, which there may well be, I can’t speak for anyone but me. I adopted the phrase after a WELS Lutheran pastor told me, “if I had to believe in evolution, I like your version better than any other I’ve seen, you went beyond theistic evolution to Biblical evolution.” (I.e., I can trace the foundations of evolutionary biology in the first two chapters of Genesis, rather than simply saying, “It happened, so God must have done it.”)

I don’t try to be terribly specific, because I don’t think we really know anything but the broad contours. The animal component falls short of what even a secular humanist expects of humanity, much less what God expects. And I personally think of sin in terms of “all fall short of the glory of God” rather than in terms of “bless me father, for I have sinned.” That’s one reason I can’t be a communicant member of a WELS church — I definitely do NOT believe any of us deserve punishment for being what we were created as.

Atonement? I don’t have any specific notion on that either. I’ve recently read that substitutionary atonement was first set forth by a monk in England around 1000 A.D. Yes, some phrases from Paul could be read that way, but it wasn’t fundamental to understanding what it meant to be Christian. I’m content to say that in some manner the Word became flesh, and a covenant originally made with twelve tribes was, in modified form, opened up to all of humanity.

So many answers to “why” questions about spiritual matters end with “It’s a mystery.” OK, let’s just leave it at that, and not try to work out all the precise details when we have no idea.

This may be a little ironic, but I’ve always felt that evolution fits in best with the Eastern Orthodox conception of human ontology, where “original sin” never seemed to have caught on in the way it has in the West, as far as “guilt” and “divine justice” are concerned. After Jesus, it’s even possible to see (maybe as JonF would point out) the resurrection and finally theosis as the “next step” of human evolution — humans “coming to be fully human.” To my mind this is a lot better than the more “Atonement”-based theologies of the Protestants.

The problem is, there does not seem to be evidence that evolution has any teleology at all, and any theological hypothesis ought to stand or fall on the evidence.

A while back (maybe two years ago?) there was a series that Edward Feser did on his blog about the original ensoulment of Adam and Eve at some point in the paleolithic, as an attempt to save that doctrine against the genetic evidence that the smallest human bottleneck could only have been 2000-10000 individuals or so at the lowest. His idea was that the ensouled would have mated with the unensouled zombies around them, but all of the offspring would have had souls. OK, he didn’t call them “zombies,” but he almost described them that way: they would have been animals utterly incapable of any rational thought, and possibly without any “there” there. And it would have been the first ensouled couple that would have brought The Fall on the rest of mankind.

I’m afraid I just can’t take this kind of confabulation seriously. I’m left asking why revelation could not have just told humans the truth about their origins (and for that matter the nature of their biology, genetics, and so forth), and why it required the heroic scientific efforts of the last 150 years to finally get us on the right track and in the process cause so many theological crises. It seems Providence would rather us live in the dark, despite our best efforts to uncover the truth.

MH, re the Temptation in the Wilderness, I can’t do better than to recommend the excellent book Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus by the Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon, one of my favorite authors. You can read a substantial part of his take on it here, pages 33-43.

Another Matt: This may be a little ironic, but I’ve always felt that evolution fits in best with the Eastern Orthodox conception of human ontology….

I completely agree–as I’ve gotten older and read more widely, I’ve concluded that in many respects, Orthodox theology is superior to Catholic theology. I think the West could learn a lot from the East in this respect.

Re Feser, I’ve read his blog on and off for years. I have respect for him, but I think his Thomism is a bit rigid, and (if I understand him correctly) I think he defends some aspects of Aristotle’s thought that, IMO and in view of modern physics, are just untenable. I had a long discussion on a Catholic blog with someone who pushed the same “ensouled humans interbred with non-ensouled humanoid primates” argument, but I just think that not only is that wrong, it’s really creepy, too.

If it’s true that Japan doesn’t have a flood myth, I find that very interesting in light of the fact that their word “tsunami” is so definitive.

Not sure what you mean here. “Tsunami” just means “harbor wave”. It’s common enough in Japan that they have a specific term for it. Maybe for them it’s so quotidian that it would seem beside the point to mythologize it? After all, the familiar isn’t usually the stuff of legend.

Noah, thanks for the link. From what’s quoted about the Egyptian legends, it’s hard to tell if it’s a deluge account or a broader myth (a creation from primordial waters is another common motif, which doesn’t necessarily imply a flood). Barring discovery of better papyri, we’ll probably never know.

All, the whole unensouled humans talk reminds me of the p-zombies discussion of philosophers. It strikes me as impossible that the fully human wouldn’t notice anything wrong with the p-zombies.

As an aside Aristotle was a good biologist and did invent formal logic, but was a complete train wreck with regards to astronomy. Since his metaphysics was a product of his astronomical views, I’m not sure why anyone wants to rescue it.

I can’t wrap my mind around the notion of unensouled humans either. Either one is human, or one is not. But yes, I am informed (when I ask — which I often do about Old Testament meanings) that all life has a nefesh, but only humans have a nefesh chayyim. Without a nefesh, there is no life, only a pile of dead meat.

I’ve never read Feser, but it sounds like he is trying to get into specific details that neither science nor scripture offers. Therefore, its speculation, and rather tortuous speculation at that. Why bother?

Evolution does not have any teleology because science does not deal with teleology.

Hmm. That sounds like saying “there could in principle be no evidence that anything behaves teleologically.” I don’t think that’s the case at all — but science will in general prefer an explanation without final causes to one with them, if they explain the data equally, because they’re simpler and easier to generalize to other domains when applicable.

Even the original formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics had a teleological bent to it, as though the universe were trying to increase entropy — there was no automatic scientific dismissal of final causes even in this case. If I’m not mistaken, Boltzmann’s reformulation of the law in statistical terms simplified it considerably and made the teleological explanation superfluous. No doubt a lot of scientists slept easier after the new explanation, but that isn’t really relevant to what views science as a collective enterprise holds about teleology.

PS — Daniel Dennett has a lecture on youtube called “The evolution of purposes” where he tries to show that teleology only ever arises from Darwinian evolution, but that there’s nothing teleological about the Darwinian processes themselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L7uNyQL0H0

That’s not quite true either, I think. One of the biggest takeaways from evolution is that it no longer makes sense to speak of essences with regard to species: there was no first mammal, there was no first human, there was no first white man, etc. It’s all slow transition and development.

What someone like Feser is trying to do is to save the Aristotelian-Thomist idea that one needs an extra something — a human soul, over and above the animal soul — to have rational thought, and that something like that could not just develop in the Darwinian way. So it had to be implanted in at least two of the early hominids.

MH is right — it suffers greatly from all the problems that attend p-zombies, but whether you think the idea that there could be unensouled human in principle depends in large part on how seriously you take the idea of the soul as some kind of immaterial essence, rather than as a kind of metaphor for “the way in which something or someone is materially organized.”

Note: The software says “Duplicate comment detected,” but I can’t find it here. If I overlooked something, sorry about the duplication.

there was no first mammal, there was no first human, there was no first white man, etc. It’s all slow transition and development.

Actually, its NOT all slow transition and development. One component of evolution is the tendency of any genetic line, over time, to diverge from other genetic lines that trace back to a common parent. Another is the catastrophic destruction of MOST life forms in a given area, or the entire planet, after which, new life forms develop rather rapidly.

It was once believed that dinosaurs died out, and mammals arose. In recent decades, it has become clear that mammals co-existed with dinosaurs, but remained quite small, until the dinosaurs were wiped out, not once, but twice. The first time, mammals didn’t become dominant, new species of dinosaurs did.

It is fallacious to assume that any given ramapithecus is one of our ancestors. Most ramapithecus went right on having ramapithecus babies, until the entire species was extinct. Here and there, one or two or five or one hundred ramapithecus might have had babies more like homo erectus, etc. If there was no a first homo sapiens, there was a first tribe or little group that went through the genetic bottleneck, and ever since have been having homo sapiens babies.

Now the evolution of congenital melanin deficiency probably was gradual, but basically tribes who moved north found that dark-skinned babies tended to die of Vitamin D deficiency, while lighter skinned babies (who would have died of sunstroke in tropical climes) were more likely to survive.

Even the original formulation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics had a teleological bent to it, as though the universe were trying to increase entropy

Yes, and as if chlorine ions were TRYING to attack to sodium ions, as if two hydrogen atoms DESIRED to attach to oxygen, as if sodium atoms NEED to lose that one electron… its hard to speak of such things without using human concepts. But science doesn’t KNOW whether there is any such animating principle, or whether such reactions are just the nature of uncaused inanimate matter.

I doubt that atoms have a teleology, but I suspect the universe does. Science, to date, can only deal with the empirical details, and how they fit together with each other.